Page 148 of White Lights
“There’s no script, no Scribe,” she says, stalling.
“You’ve already proven you can handle this on your own. Just as you did with your brother’s film.”
“And if I refuse?”
“Sheol can’t be as bad as they say it is,” Dr. Ezekiel muses. “Sometimes I envy the aesthetic—the absence of all things. Talk about minimalism!”
Dez stares at him, disgusted, incredulous.
Dr. Ezekiel dips his head in a modest bow before he turns to go.
Then Dez is alone with her Lens again, vibrating with fear and anger.
There’s no way in hell she’s making this film. But if she doesn’t, someone else will. Someone who doesn’t know or care about Asher. He will still die. Within the hour. And Dez will be doomed to Sheol forever.
Unless …
Her hand flies to her pocket and she fingers Eri’s Soma pill. What if she can slow time long enough to save him?
But she’s trapped here. No way down this godforsaken mountain. And she doesn’t even know where he is. Or what he’s up against.
Fear and fury quicken her mind as she opens her Lens again and turns back to Asher’s Lifeline. She needs to find him in the present moment.
Her thoughts run in a million directions. Her Lens can’t even keep up. On the screen in front of her, Asher’s Lifeline spins out of control, blurring his life until Dez can’t see anything clearly. She forces herselfto breathe, to calm. When Asher’s teenaged body finally focuses on the screen, striding through a high school hallway, Dez springs into action, swiping through vast bands of time on film. She needs to get all the way to the end of his Lifeline, to see what precipice of death he’s standing on.
Finally, she comes to the end, the scene before her snapping back when she tries to scroll ahead. So, this is him. This is now.
He’s in a bedroom, grabbing a T-shirt from a drawer. So ordinary, so secure, she can’t accept what’s coming for him. She stares at his hands, at every single detail, greedy to gather more. Now he stands shirtless before a mirror, giving Dez a long look at his naked chest. She swallows, aching to know him more than she does. The clock on his wall ticks like a bomb. His lithe arms and broad shoulders squeeze Dez’s heart. His serious, beautiful, unsuspecting face in the mirror’s reflection brings tears to her eyes.
He willnotdie. She will not let him.
He pulls the T-shirt over his head and grabs car keys from the dresser. And then, as he’s heading for the door, something impossible catches Dez’s eye.
Her royal-blue sweatshirt. The one with the white hibiscus flower embroidered on the sleeve. The one she wore at the Dairy Barn in the scene she took from Silas’s Lifeline. Which she then clipped and placed in Asher’s.
In the out-of-time moment at the beach, when she and Asher kissed, Dez was wearing that sweatshirt.
Now, somehow that sweatshirt is folded on Asher’s dresser.
Does it mean Dez took it off in Asher’s house? In Asher’s room? And left it here? Did she come home with him after the beach that day?
And if she left it there, what happened after that? Had they not seen each other again?
Less than two weeks passed between the day Dez met Asher andfilmedGlimpseand the night she hurt Mo at the Dairy Barn. The night Jet stole her car and her brother, and Rafe rolled up to her on the road when she was running after them. And Rafe told her about Acheron. And Dez said yes. And left her life as she knew it.
If it’s true that when Dez dropped that clip of herself into Asher’s beach, she altered Asher’s experience of them … does he think she ghosted him when she left for Acheron?
She would never have done that.
But he might think she did.
This complicates things. Not enough to stop her from trying to save his life, but enough to make her worry that he may not want to see her.
It’s five o’clock at Acheron, four o’clock in California. He’ll be dead before dinner, dead before the sun sets, dead before Dez can do anything about it.
On-screen, he’s leaving the house, stepping into a bright blue day.
“Don’t go anywhere,” she tells him as he skips down three porch steps. From a crawl space under the porch, he grabs a surfboard and hoists it over his shoulder. He walks to his driveway, slides the board into the back seat of his green Jeep Wrangler. He’s going surfing. It’s going to kill him.
